Many people use the Internet to research information about a specific venue. For example, a user may use the Internet in order to research restaurants that are available in or around the Atlanta, Ga. location of an amusement park known as Six Flags®, operated by the company Six Flags Theme Parks, Inc. The user would use a device to access a website on the Internet that provides the needed information. One website might be Live Search Maps, which is accessible via the Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”) http://maps.live.com/. This website is offered by Microsoft Corp., located in Seattle, Wash. Users may access the Internet, find the Live Search website, and enter the location of any venue. The user does not necessarily have to be at a venue in order to research the venue. Live Search will return a map of the venue, along with information such as restaurants that are nearby. Another service might be the Six Flags website, which is accessible via the URL http://www.sixflags.com.
Accessing information from a website on the Internet requires several steps. First, the user's device requests content from the website. The website receives the request and thereafter causes content to be transmitted over the Internet to the device. The device receives the transmitted content and displays it for the user. Although these steps may occur relatively quickly, the user must often proceed through a series of steps to find the content the user really needs.
For example, the first content that is displayed for the user is the website's home page, which contains graphics and other generic information. Providing specific information from the home page of a website is not desirable because doing so may look cluttered and unattractive. For example, the Six Flags website indicates that there are twelve theme park locations in ten different states. Providing specific information for each location directly from the home page of the Six Flags website would be cluttered and overwhelming for users. Therefore, most websites offer hyperlinks that allow the user to access more specific content. For example, a user may follow a hyperlink to gain more information about the Atlanta, Ga. location, and from there follow a hyperlink to gain more information about restaurants within that location. Each time the user clicks on a hyperlink, the user's device requests content, the website receives the request and transmits the content to the device, and the user's device receives and displays the content. As this series of hyperlinks demonstrates, one problem with traditional methods of accessing content is that a user must actively seek out and sort through many pages of content.
Another problem associated with traditional methods of accessing content is that the user might be unaware the content is available. In the example above, the user at Six Flags might not be aware that the website contains information about restaurants or that the website had coupons for dinner specials. Without knowing about the dinner specials, the user might have foregone eating at Six Flags altogether. Therefore, Six Flags would lose the profit on the user's dinner that it would have made had the user been aware of the special. Also, the user would be forced to leave the park and find a more reasonably-priced dinner elsewhere.
As illustrated by the Six Flags example above, downloading content benefits users by providing needed information. It benefits venues such as Six Flags by distributing information and increasing the knowledge base of users at the venue. These traditional methods of informing users are lacking, however, because they do not provide content in real-time. In general, they require a user to access the Internet and research the venue in advance. But it is not always convenient for users who are already at a venue to research information about that venue. For example, as discussed above it is often inconvenient to navigate hyperlinks on a website. Also, the user must actively seek out the content—it is not delivered in real time.
Additionally, traditional methods are lacking because the transmission of content does not depend on a user's location—in other words, traditional methods do not track the location of a user and provide content based on that location. While there are known methods that can track a user's location, they do not provide content based on the user's location. For example, there are sports watches that use Global Positioning System (hereinafter, “GPS”) to track a runner's path. One example of such a sports watch is the Forerunner 305 model, manufactured by Garmin International, Inc., located in Olathe, Kans. Once the run is over, the runner can connect the Forerunner 305 to a device that has Internet access in order to use Internet-based software to obtain more information, such as running routes or suggested training programs and diets based on the run data. Examples of such Internet-based software include a program called MotionBased®—also provided by Garmin International, Inc.—and TrainingPeaks—provided by Peaksware, LLC, located in Lafayette, Colo. While these systems are able to track a user's location using GPS, they do not provide specific content in real-time based on the user's location.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods that provide real-time content to a user based on that user's location, where the content is tailored for that location, without the need for the user to be aware of and seek that content.